Personal computers and the Internet greatly enhanced communications and access to information from around the world. Typically, visual information is displayed on a monitor screen and data can be added or manipulated via keystrokes on an associated keyboard. Feedback is provided visually to the user by the monitor screen. Blind users cannot utilize the information appearing on the monitor screen while visually impaired users may experience difficulty doing so. Accordingly, screen readers have been developed to assist blind and visually impaired users when they use a personal computer.
A screen reader is software that interprets the output of a computer as sent to a computer screen and converts it into alternative output. Typically, the alternative output is in the form of synthetic speech or Braille characters. Screen readers are particularly useful for a blind or low-vision user. One such screen reader is JAWS® by FREEDOM SCIENTIFIC®. When installed on a personal computer, JAWS® provides access to the operating system, software applications, and the Internet. JAWS® includes a speech synthesizer that cooperates with the sound card in the personal computer to read aloud information appearing on the computer monitor screen or that is derived through communicating directly with the application or operating system. Additionally, JAWS® includes an interface that can provide output to refreshable Braille displays. Thus, JAWS® provides access to a wide variety of information, education, and job related applications.
Available screen readers have a limited ability to navigate the Internet. No matter how many times a user has visited a certain web page and performed a number of actions to navigate to a certain portion of the web page, the user must repeat a number of actions to arrive at that portion of the web page each time the user visits the web page. A typical sighted user, or “typical user”, can make a cursory scan of the window of data until he or she arrives at the desired information. In performing that scan, a great amount of data can be passed over quickly until the desired information is found. That desired information is then considered in greater detail while the scanned information is otherwise ignored and forgotten. For the typical user such a process is a trivial task. For a vision-impaired or blind user it is not nearly as simple. The blind or vision-impaired user will frequently utilize a screen reader to access the information that would otherwise be displayed on the screen. To output the information, the screen reader must serially pass the information to the display device. By “display” it is meant that the information is presented to the user in a manner in which the information can be meaningfully assessed by the user. Display is not limited to visual presentations of data, but may include other means of presenting such as auditory output and Braille devices. The user experiences the associated information in the order provided by the underlying application. A great amount of time can be spent waiting to arrive at the information sought by the user.
This process becomes even more inconvenient when the user accesses a certain web page repeatedly. For example, a user may access their banking institution's web page each month to pay a cell phone bill with the aid of a screen reader, such as JAWS®. In order to do this, the user opens the browser, opens the list of bookmarked web pages, and selects their banking institution. When the page loads, the user opens the JAWS® list of links, locates the sign-in link by typing “S I G,” and presses ‘Enter’ to activate it. The sign-in page loads. Now, the user presses the ‘Ctrl’ key to stop JAWS® from reading the page automatically, and presses the JAWS® quick navigation key ‘E’ twice to move to the second edit field on the page to enter the user name. After filling out the form, a page with several course navigation options is presented to the user, each leading to pages with finer and finer options. Example pages are: “payments”, “make a one-time payment”, “select a payee”, and “enter your payment information”. For each of these pages, the user locates the link she wants by using the JAWS® list of links, searching for the link text on the page, reading through the page until she arrives at the link, or using various combinations of quick navigation keys to hunt for the link. The user must go through all these steps each time the user pays the cell phone bill. What is needed is a means of shortening the navigation time of a web page by focusing the screen reader on areas the user has previously shown interest in.